Essay on “Traceblog,” Chapter Contribution to Net Works Book Publication
I
[…] Traceblog was developed in reaction to one of my previous projects titled Diary of a Star (2004-07), a blog that appropriated entries from The Andy Warhol Diaries. As exciting as Diary of a Star was for me to produce, it consumed more time than I expected because entries had to be carefully written and took much longer to compose than average blog posts. Soon after I finished the Warhol project I began to think about the changes that had taken place with the shift to Web 2.0, and how blogging had changed since 2004. I realized that keeping track of people’s surfing activity had become an important element for private, public, and state organizations to data-mine patterns of communication and consumption online. The term “social media” began to be used more often when discussing the growth of early networks such as Orkut, and Friendster around 2004, the period when I began to develop Diary of a Star.
I evaluated the changes in online activity since 2004 and decided to develop Traceblog to reflect on the new stage that global culture was entering in 2008, during which millions of people around the world willingly shared information about themselves online, via social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace, as well as YouTube, not to mention thousands of blogs, which by such time were conventional tools of communication for average Internet users. The result of the social media frenzy is an attitude of sharing that is ubiquitous in 2010, the time of this writing.
[…] Traceblog is a direct result of my ongoing practice as artist and media researcher. It makes the most of the default state of works of art in new media practice as informational forms, not defined by physical presentation. Traceblog and similar online works function in a state of flux defined by the growing archive and its relation to the ever-present: the now.
Table of Contents
List of Figures x
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Contributors xiv
Introduction to Net Works 1 (2)
Xtine Burrough
PART I Formalism and Conceptual Art 3 (22)
Formalism and Conceptual Art, introduction 3 (4)
Edward A. Shanken
1 Color Field Paintings (Browser) 7 (9)
Michael Demers
2 YouTube as a Subject 16 (9)
Constant Dullaart
PART II Collections and Communities 25 (22)
Virtual Communities: An Interview with 25 (2)
Howard Rheingold
Xtine Burrough
Howard Rheingold
3 WTF?! 27 (11)
Robert Nideffer
4 SF Garden Registry 38 (9)
Amy Franceschini
David Lu
Myriel Milicevic
PART III Crowdsourcing and Participation 47 (29)
Cheaper by the Dozen: An Introduction to 47 (8)
“Crowdsourcing”
Trebor Scholz
5 Mechanical Olympics 55 (11)
Xtine Burrough
6 Google Maps Road Trip 66 (10)
Peter Baldes
Marc Horowitz
PART IV Data Visualization 76 (24)
On Data Visualization 76 (3)
7 Superfund365 79 (11)
Brooke Singer
8 Pastiche 90 (10)
Christian Marc Schmidt
PART V Error and Noise 100 (21)
Seductive Errors: A Poetics of Noise, 100 (4)
introduction
Mark Nunes
9 Luscious 104 (7)
Fernanda Viegas
Martin Wattenberg
10 Tumbarumba 111 (10)
Ethan Ham
PART VI Surveillance 121 (24)
Web 2.0 Surveillance and Art, introduction 121 (7)
Christian Fuchs
11 F’Book: What My Friends Are Doing in 128 (9)
Facebook
Lee Walton
12 Traceblog 137 (8)
Eduardo Navas
PART VII Tactical Media and Democracy 145 (21)
Tactical Media, introduction 145 (3)
Critical Art Ensemble
13 The Good Life/La Buena Vida 148 (10)
Carlos Motta
Eva Diaz
Freckles Studio
Stamatina Gregory
14 Oiligarchy 158 (8)
Molleindustria
Paolo Pedercini
PART VIII Open Source 166 (23)
Open Source Creativity, introduction 166 (4)
David M. Berry
15 The Real Costs 170 (9)
Michael Mandiberg
16 Add-Art: Sharing, Freedom, and Beer 179 (10)
Steve Lambert
PART IX Hacking and Remixing 189 (21)
Hacking and Remixing, introduction 189 (3)
Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss
17 Pigeonblog 192 (8)
Beatriz Da Costa
18 Joyce Walks 200 (10)
Conor Mcgarrigle
PART X Performance and Analog Counterparts 210 (18)
Performance and Analog Counterparts, 210 (2)
introduction
Ken Goldberg
19 The Gandhi Complex: The Mahatma in 212 (9)
Second Life
Joseph Delappe
20 Alerting Infrastructure! Challenging the 221 (7)
Temporality of Physical versus Virtual
Environments
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Index 228